"Doyle, Arthur Conan - The New Revelation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

phenomena produced in the dark must necessarily lose
much of their value, unless they are accompanied by
evidential messages as well. It is the custom of our
critics to assume that if you cut out the mediums who
got into trouble you would have to cut out nearly all
your evidence. That is not so at all. Up to the time
of this incident I had never sat with a professional
medium at all, and yet I had certainly accumulated some
evidence. The greatest medium of all, Mr. D. D. Home,
showed his phenomena in broad daylight, and was ready
to submit to every test and no charge of trickery was
ever substantiated against him. So it was with many
others. It is only fair to state in addition that when
a public medium is a fair mark for notoriety hunters,
for amateur detectives and for sensational reporters,
and when he is dealing with obscure elusive phenomena
and has to defend himself before juries and judges who,
as a rule, know nothing about the conditions which
influence the phenomena, it would be wonderful if a man
could get through without an occasional scandal. At
the same time the whole system of paying by results,
which is practically the present system, since if a
medium never gets results he would soon get no
payments, is a vicious one. It is only when the
professional medium can be guaranteed an annuity which
will be independent of results, that we can eliminate
the strong temptation, to substitute pretended
phenomena when the real ones are wanting.

I have now traced my own evolution of thought up to
the time of the War. I can claim, I hope, that it was
deliberate and showed no traces of that credulity with
which our opponents charge us. It was too deliberate,
for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence
I may possess into the scale of truth. I might have
drifted on for my whole life as a psychical Researcher,
showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante
attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were
arguing about some impersonal thing such as the
existence of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy. But
the War came, and when the War came it brought
earnestness into all our souls and made us look more
closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values.
In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day
of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first
promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one
the wives and mothers who had no clear conception
whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly
to see that this subject with which I had so long
dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the